What are you searching for ?

Insight : “Nothing that is outside of us can get us lasting happiness”

When I look back at life I find that there always has been something that I have been searching for and I find that search common in humanity. As children we search for new toys to own as adults we search for things. Behind the entire search is a search for happiness and we search for happiness in objects. Yet the happiness from objects is momentary, it passes, until the next desire appears and we think this is it, once we get this one we will be happy. When we find that getting all the objects we desired does not lead to the lasting happiness we turn to experiences.

We turn to entertainment, we turn to alcohol, drugs, sex anything that will take us closer to happiness. This too does not work; even the happiness from experiences is momentary. At some stage in life a few turn to altered states for happiness, we turn to spirituality and meditation to give us that which we have been chasing all along- ‘lasting happiness’. We find that even the altered states where we feel momentary happiness are not lasting.

Every being desires lasting happiness and finds nothing in this world – objects, relationships, experiences, states of mind fulfills that desire.

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Some do not even realize this and continue on a nonstop treadmill all their life hoping that someday they will get there.

As much as we desire happiness we wish to avoid pain in our life and so we do all we can to control our situations, we build ever taller walls so that the objects we accumulated the relationships we accumulated are not snatched away. We live in fear of losing our accumulations. The desire for happiness leads us to fear!

Fear of death is the fear of losing all the things we have accumulated, because in death we see all things we felt we owned being snatched away, including the body we associate ourselves with. The whole life is lived in a rush to accumulate, to experience happiness and finally we realize that the outward search has been in vain.

What we think of as happiness actually is pain, because it is not lasting. Having a child is associated with pleasure, yet when one looks ahead; sickness of the child or losing the child is pain. Having money in the bank is pleasure; fear of losing it is pain. Having drugs or alcohol looks like pleasure but addiction to any substance leads to pain!